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Colorado's practice of liberty and equality today would meet with approval from Thomas Jefferson. Andrews, affirmative; Quillen, negative.
To begin with, I feel a certain sympathy for Thomas
Jefferson. He was much more comfortable writing than
speaking, and so also am I. Jefferson was so reluctant to
speak before an audience that he had a clerk read his
annual address to Congress. In those days, apparently,
presidents wrote their speeches and had other people
deliver them, while today, the other people write the
speeches and our presidents deliver them. I doubt that
Jefferson would think this was an improvement. Another
change from his time to ours: Back then, candidates
stood
for office. Today, they run
for office.
And that's another change that would doubtless perturb Mr.
Jefferson.
The question before us is whether Jefferson would
approve of Colorado's practice of liberty and equality
today.
And we should remember the statement of Joseph Ellis,
one of the best analysts of Jefferson: Lifting Jefferson
out of that context and bringing him into the present is
like trying to plant cut flowers.
But we can start with whether Jefferson would approve of Colorado. He obviously favored westward expansion, since he pursued the 1803 Louisiana Purchase even though he believed it was unconstitutional, and even drew up a constitutional amendment to allow the purchase.
He dispatched Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River to reach the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia [Can talk about his odd rationalist] geography. He dispatched a similar expedition, led by trained naturalists, the Freeman-Curtis expedition which was supposed to ascend the Red River and descend the Arkansas -- they were met by Spanish soldiers just inside present Texas, and were forced to turn back.
He did not dispatch the first official American expedition into Colorado, led by Zebulon M. Pike [Wilkinson, the Burr Conspiracy, etc.] But he did approve of it later.
And since Pike's trek led to the Santa Fe Trail that led to the Mexican War that brought the rest of Colorado into the Union, we can figure that he approved of Colorado being an American province -- Jefferson, after all, was willing to go to war with Spain, which held that territory before Mexican independence in 1821.
As to whether he would approve of Colorado being part of the same United States of America that he knew, he might well be surprised, for he thought the western states might secede and form their own union some day, to no one's great harm.
He would approve the shape of Colorado -- he liked regular boundaries, based on a rational surveying system. Our landscape of rectangular sections and townships that bear no relation to the land they sit on is a legacy of Jefferson's days in the Congress that operated under the Articles of Confederation.
But would not approve of the size of Colorado. Based on his plans for the Northwest Territory of his day -- the land between Pennsylvania and the Mississippi, north of the Ohio River -- his ideal size for a state was about 20,000 square miles, approximately the size of New Jersey. He would not approve of a state of 104,000 square miles.
Nor would he approve of a polity where 85 percent of the
population lived in urban areas. He wrote that The mobs
of great cities add just so much to support of pure
government as sores do to the strength of the human
body.
He wrote to James Madison that Our governments
will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are
chiefly agricultural When they get piled upon one another
in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as
in Europe.
So, a dominant urban faction means a corrupt government, and a corrupt government does not foster liberty and equality. Jefferson would not approve.
But I should note that Jefferson was a man of urbane tastes who liked urban products, like books and music. He believed that the cities of Europe could provide those to his chaste rural continent, though.
In other words, Jefferson was just like those people who want concrete but don't want gravel pits, who want electricity without power lines or generating plants -- he was a Not In My Back Yard NIMBY. And given how much NIMBYism there is Colorado, he might well approve of that aspect of our political system.
What sort of political system did Jefferson favor? Over
his long career in public life, he was involved at several
levels -- county, state, federal. Each had its own
responsibilities. His ideals for state government were
expressed in 1776, just before he wrote the Declaration of
Independence, when he produced a Draft Constitution for
Virginia.
It provided for elections every years to the House of Representatives. He believed that frequent elections would keep government accountable. He would not approve of our two-year terms in Colorado.
He extended the franchise to every sane male of age who
held a quarter-acre in town, or 25 acres in the country,
and to all who had lived and paid taxes in the commonwealth
for at least two years. He made no mention of citizenship,
and later in the Kentucky Resolution, he argued that the
federal government had no power over aliens
inside a
state. He would not approve of our modern requirement of
American citizenship for voting -- it is not a step toward
liberty and equality as Jefferson saw it.
Jefferson might have come around on black voters, since
he speculated that if slaves had the same advantages as
their owners, they might display the same talents. But he
saw the involvement of women in politics as a threat to
public morals, and thus perhaps to liberty and equality.
Women, who to prevent depravation of morals and
ambiguity of issue, should not mix promiscuously in the
public meetings of men,
he once wrote, and he believed
men might function better if women were contented to
soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning
ruffled from politics.
The Senators of Jefferson's ideal Virginia would be chosen by the House, to serve three-year terms. Our state senate terms are twice as long, and made by direct election. Jefferson might well approve of our concept of term limits, but find them too lenient -- these senators had a lifetime limit of one three-year term.
Appellate judges would be able to join debates in the
senate, but not vote. They would hold lifetime appointments
during good behavior. The judiciary,
he once wrote
to Madison, is a body which if rendered independent
is one which merits great confidence.
He would
certainly find Colorado's process of judicial retention,
let alone the proposed term limits for appellate judges, a
threat to judicial independence and thus to the liberty and
equality that a good government was supposed to foster.
He would find it oppressive that Colorado has any gun
regulations, for in his Virginia, no freeman shall be
debarred the use of arms.
He likewise would find our
military a threat to liberty, since There shall be no
standing army, but in time of actual war,
and a
standing army was a dangerous machine.
And I may note that Nor shall they [the General
Assembly] have the power to prescribe torture in any case
whatever.
Obviously, Jefferson would not have wanted
his state to be associated with any government which did
claim such power. Likewise, I am sure, he would have been
horrified by any government which claimed the power to
prohibit the cultivation of a useful crop like hemp, which
he grew himself.
Jefferson was a strong believer in public education --
it was he who first proposed to set aside the school
sections
on public lands to support public education.
His plan for Virginia had universal public education,
including girls, with everyone getting at least three
years, and then free continued education, clear through the
university level, for the most promising students. He
believed that a republic required an educated
citizenry.
Thus he might well be amazed at how Colorado supports alternatives like home schooling, charter schools, and parochial schools that, instead of teaching reason and enlightenment, would pass on superstition and bigotry.
But he would doubtless also be appalled by the results of our expensive system of public education.
He expected the three-year elementary schools to teach
reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books
which shall be used therein for instructing the children to
read shall be such as will at the same time make them
acquainted with Grecian, Roman, English, and American
history.
We have many students who have gone to school
for 12 or 13 years who do not know what century our Civil
War was in.
After the three years, the better students would go to a
grammar school for three more years, where they would learn
the Latin and Greek languages, English grammar,
geography, and the higher part of numerical arithmetick, to
wit, vulgar and decimal fractions, and the extraction of
the square and cube roots.
That after six years -- how many of our 12th-grade graduates could extract a cube root or conjugate a Latin verb? Clearly we do not match Jefferson's vision for education, and without an educated populace, how can we sustain a republic to protect liberty and equality?
The other day I picked up my daily newspaper, and saw
there the pronouncements of a Colorado archbishop
concerning this election. This would have greatly
disappointed Jefferson, who coined the term wall of
separation between church and state.
His last letter, written just 10 days before his death
on July 4, 1826, called his Declaration of Independence
the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under
which monkish ignorance and superstition have persuaded
them to bind themselves.
Years earlier he wrote that History, I believe,
furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining
a free and civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance, of which the political as well as the religious
leaders will always avail themselves for their own
purposes.
So, would Jefferson approve of modern Colorado's practice of liberty and equality?
We have far less liberty than he envisioned. Rural freeholders enjoy liberty; urban dwellers, that is, about 85% of Colorado, are mobs that threaten liberty. We regulate many aspects of life, from the plants that people grow to the ways they might arm themselves, where Jefferson saw regulation as a trampling on our sacred rights. Jefferson believed that a constitutional revision every 20 years or so was a necessity to preserve liberty; we creak along on a state constitution written 130 years ago.
In other words, honest artisans and mechanics do get visited by tax collectors, as well as a host of other officers to eat out their substance. Jefferson fought that throughout his life, so how could he possibly see much liberty in modern Colorado?
As for equality, Jefferson fought against the rich tidewater aristocrats and on behalf of the mountain yeomanry -- he wanted everyone, including the children of the poor, to have the opportunity to join what he called the natural aristocracy of merit. We underfund the schools of the poor, and undereducate everyone.
We have gained a degree of political equality -- that is, the right to vote and hold office, the right to sue and be sued -- that might have gained Jefferson's approval, although our treatment of immigrants falls far short of his ideals. But since these rights are by and large diverted to the interests of the wealthy -- few others hold high political office, and the side with the most expensive lawyers generally wins -- Jefferson would be appalled by the results. In other words, the equality exists only on paper, not in practical life, and Jefferson would know that we have a long way to go.
No, Colorado gives lip service to liberty and equality. But it practices neither, and Jefferson would be ashamed of the territory that once bore his name.
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